A lyrical story that gave me a lot of insight into the battle to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Askins is my kind of crazy. She's an inspiring environmentalist, one of the people who was integral to bringing wolves back to Yellowstone National Park.

The author said this book is about "keeping a promise, living a passion, loving an animal, never turning back, not giving up hope... living in the hell between the hopes"... it's all that. Her writing is visceral and unapologetic. Too often, wildlife biologist communicate in a bloodless manner, as if explaining why they care would compromise the integrity of their research. This is a story for readers who want to be there: in the wild, and in the hearts of the people who love and hate wolves. Experience the opera that is wildlife management in the USA.

Wikipedia in English

After forming an intense bond with Natasha, a wolf cub she raised as part of her undergraduate research, Renée Askins was inspired to found the Wolf Fund. As head of this grassroots organization, she made it her goal to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where they had been eradicated by man over seventy years before. Here, Askinsrecounts her courageous fifteen-year campaign, wrangling along the way with Western ranchers and their political allies in Washington, enduring death threats, and surviving the anguish of illegal wolf slayings to ensure that her dream of restoring Yellowstone’s ecological balance would one day be realized. Told in powerful, first-person narrative, Shadow Mountainis the awe-inspiring story of her mission and her impassioned meditation on our connection to the wild.